vacated, “what I’d like you to do is to tell me again what you were telling me just before we came here.”
“About the chauffeur, you mean?”
Caravale looked at Lombardo. “The chauffeur? What about the chauffeur? What’s he talking about?”
Lombardo smiled and put a finger to his lips. “Patience.”
“That’s right, the chauffeur.”
“Should the microphones be closer?” Basilio asked. “I should probably speak directly into them, because, you see, I’ve found that my voice is difficult to record clearly. It has something to do with a defect of the soft palate —”
“No, just continue to speak normally to me, as you are. The microphones will do their job.”
“Very well. Enrico. A sad case. What exactly do you want me to say?”
“What you told me before. The facts, that’s all. About how he never should have been there... all that.”
Caravale frowned. “What’s he talking about? Never should have been there...?”
“Just listen, will you?” Lombardo said. “For God’s sake.”
Caravale muttered something, fumbled in a pocket, and stuck half of an unlit cigar in his mouth.
Basilio, having already told his story several times that day, was unusually concise. Aurora Costruzioni employed two chauffeur-bodyguards. On the day of the kidnapping, Enrico Dellochio, the one who had been killed trying to protect Achille, had actually been scheduled to have the day off. His alternate, Casimiro Praga, regularly worked mornings and generally was the one who drove Achille to school. But on this particular day Praga had telephoned half an hour before he was due to arrive, complaining of a severe stomachache. The office had called in Dellochio instead, and it was he, to his very great misfortune, who had been driving at the time of the kidnapping.
At the same moment that Rigoli’s heavy-lidded eyes flickered in the direction of the one-way glass, Caravale impulsively clenched his fist, inadvertently snapping the half-cigar in two. The pieces fell to the floor.
“An inside job!” he said excitedly. “Of course! It’s all coming together now. Praga is in on it. He’s supposed to go along with it. At the last minute he loses his nerve, he backs out. He’s replaced by Dellochio, who has no idea what’s going to happen. That’s why there was all that shooting.”
He smacked his forehead and turned angrily on Lombardo. “Why didn’t we know about this before?”
Lombardo, who had been nodding his agreement as Caravale spoke, was affronted. “How could we know? Even today, it only came out by accident.”
“Where is this Praga?” Caravale said. “Do we have him?”
Lombardo pointed through the glass, where Rigoli was just asking the same question.
“And Casimiro Praga, what happened to him?”
“That was the last we saw of him. He never returned, never came back for references, never picked up his pay, never anything.” Basilio shrugged. “Would you like my opinion? I think he decided to look for a safer occupation back home in Padua. When you think about it, after all, it’s only sheer luck that he’s alive. By all rights, he should be dead. I saw an extremely interesting television program about the inexorability of Fate—”
“Are we hunting for Praga?” Caravale asked as they stepped away from the window. He patted his pockets irritably. “Didn’t I have a cigar?”
“We have a call in to Padua,” Lombardo said, “and our own people are working on it too. So what do you think about all this, Colonel? Pretty interesting, eh?”
“Lombardo,” Caravale said, “did you ever hear of the Theory of Interconnected Monkey Business?”
TWENTY-TWO
WITHa few free days tacked on to the end of the Pedal and Paddle Adventure for R and R (Phil had predicted they would need them), the Olivers’ plan had been to spend them in Milan and Verona, seeing the sights, while Phil spent most of his time on the island with his ersatz relatives. But on Wednesday, Gideon and Julie were slow getting out of bed—they were making up for lost time, after all—not rising until almost eleven, which made a lengthy day trip impractical. So instead they stayed in Stresa, strolling the paths and gardens of the Lungolago, doing a little shopping—a wallet for Gideon, a handbag for Julie, postcards to send home before leaving (if they actually got around to it for once)—skipping meals and grazing among the cafes instead whenever the mood hit; in short, not doing much of anything beyond relaxing in each other’s company. An exceptionally lovely day.
On Thursday morning (up late again, but not quite as late as Tuesday), Julie decided that what she really wanted to do was ride in a boat without having to paddle, so they took the longest ferry ride available, an hour- and-a-half cruise north across the border to Locamo, had an outdoor fondue lunch in Switzerland, and came back, stopping for an hour in Ghiffa, a fellow passenger having assured them that the famous hat museum located there —Italy seemed to be well supplied with oddball museums—was well worth seeing, which it turned out to be. Drinks with Phil at a cafe-bar on the Lungolago while they watched the sun go down, then dinner on their own at the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees again, but this time on the back terrace, beside the extravagant garden. They sat long enough over their coffees to see the last of the daylight fade away and to feel the moisture around them as the dew gathered on the camellias. Another highly successful day, they both agreed, although perhaps they were more up to snuff on eighteenth-century hat-making tools than was strictly necessary.
The next day was their last full day in Italy and, as usual, they were making plans for what was left of it over another late breakfast, tossing around and discarding various ideas.
“You want to know what I’d really like to do?” Julie asked over a bowl of anonymous, Wheaties-like cereal she’d gotten from a plastic jar on the buffet table.
“Yes, I do. You’d like to take the day off from being tourists, not have any schedule at all, start getting ready for tomorrow. Check on our airline tickets, do some packing, make sure we have some clean clothes, take care of the postcards, rest up for the trip home, that kind of thing, so we don’t wind up all stressed out.”
The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. “How in the world did you know that?”
